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ubuntu 12.10 remote greeter

Back in early spring of 2012, I was living in Buenos Aires and decided to torture my team by asking for more work without really knowing at all what we might be asked to pick up. Call it “aspirations of a rookie manager”.

The result of my blind query was that we were told to “go figure out Windows remote desktops”, a strange path to walk down when working at a Linux distro company. The drawback when asking for new work is that you typically have to go do it.

So my team went and figured out a whole bunch about VDI and got our hands dirty down in the plumbing layer, while also learning and adopting scrum and TDD and oh by the way vala just for grins along the way, all while driving towards an extremely aggressive internal demo date.

Requirements changed on us … often, including a major design change in the client-server architecture one month before the demo. I know we did at least three complete rewrites of the architecture and stopped counting after that.

But hey, we got it done because we worked with some really great teams inside Canonical including the design team, the Orange squad, and quite a number of others.

We transitioned our work in June to Ted’s extremely capable team, and wished them luck as we got asked to go fix other problems. A few rewrites later, it’s great to see the feature finally land in 12.10.

While only a tiny bit of my team’s actual code survived all the rewrites, I like to think that we at least provided some fruitful inspiration (or perhaps bloody corpses serving as warning signs) for the final implementation.

So chapeau to all the folks involved who helped make this happen, I’m super proud of all of you.

(and if you’re reading this in Google Reader, you should click to my actual blog if you can’t see the embedded youtube video below)